To the Victor
by Mincemeats
Summary: Shantai means peace. Spoken the right way, it can even stand for hope, courage, victory. But when Shantai's older sister dies in a botched attempt at rebellion, she's suddenly worse than slave-meat for the Ra'zac Empire: She's a trophy, handed off to some noble who smokes and smiles and calls her Az'shan. He says it means 'lucky,' but Shantai has her doubts.


**AUTHOR'S NOTE:**

**"If one wishes to make a Ra'zac fanfic, one must start from scratch," I mumbled passionately and intermittently for 3 years. Well, guess who finally got around to doing that? (it's me.) So, this is the Lost Land I keep ranting about! Lovely place, let me tell ya. (I mean literally. This is what the fanfic's about.) This first chapter's a prologue of sorts. Lots of terms are going to be thrown at you, lots of things are going to be happening at a strange and sudden pace. You may feel mildly confused, perhaps nauseous. A perfectly understandable reaction, I assure you. Trust that most of this will be explained in the ensuing chapters, but if you feel your reading's too badly impaired, feel free to stop by and hit me up for a Q&amp;A! I'll answer to the best of my (spoiler omitting) ability. That's all I've got to say on the matter, I guess. Hopefully this fanfic will move along at a steadier pace than the others, but c'mon, this is me we're talking about. *laugh track* Either way, it's all oNWARDS FROM HERE HELL YEAH. **

* * *

She had brown hair and green eyes, both shorn down to something flat and dull. One had met with a razor, and the other with twelve grams of chrism dhulo.

The girl drooled when Tzurel checked her teeth, black carapace on white cuspids. When she withdrew her fingers, they dripped with saliva the color and consistency of aged honey. Tzurel wiped them on her waistcloth with faint disgust, making note of all she'd observed with her free hand, a basilisk quill, and one long, trailing curl of lokta paper.

The girl stared on, oblivious to the ritual she performed more than seventy times a night.

The Overseer didn't like it, this drug induced stupor. There was the eye patch, which destroyed depth perception, and the tasseled anklets, which crippled runners and sent them falling, skidding, onto the stones. These were simple, effective constraints that were supplied, bought, and administered cheaply. In comparison, the Empire's dhulo tithe was unnecessary, ostentatious: a turn-of-the-century luxury that made her fellow slavers increasingly unmindful of their drugged charges. Tzurel Li'ad, a nymph of some age and prestige, remembered a time when dhulo belonged to the Ra'zac, not their sniveling livestock.

Oh, but it was insurance, the Narcotorium said. More a gift to the Empire than the Protectorate and its fodder castes. Despite their lavish upbringing, most butcher-born remained . . . apprehensive about the process at hand, to put the matter mildly. The handlers had already invested so much into their journey; from bassinet to abattoir, as it were. What was one last show of goodwill? 'A flaunt of wealth,' Tzurel thought. And, like a good overseer, she thought this very quietly.

So it was that Narco apothecaries, armed with syringes and sickles and masks of burnished silver, descended upon the stockades each evening as a matter of course. Veins were cut and oil administered. Slavers were bid to step aside, Overseer Li'ad not least of all.

In return for the Empire's bleeding hearts, there would always be those who struggled and spat, who displayed with vigor that wild, desperate sort ignorance so unique to humankind. For their sake, it was fortunate just as many swarmed the aids, impaling arms and hands and grasping fingers on needle-point. Whichever way the chained and shriven leaned, their end remained the same. By the last glimpse of an indifferent sun, entire stockades would, in less than two hours, stand as quiet and idle as the twenty acres of dhulo it took to fill their veins.

And maybe it was this disdain for the whole affair that made Tzurel Li'ad the first Ra'zac to notice when, twelve meters up the way, a young slaver was run through the eye by a woman and her rusty iron shiv.

It happened quickly–so quickly, Tzurel nearly missed it. It was a flash of metal, a spurt of blood, the sound of cartilage crunching; of a breath, his last, whistling off the edge of an open beak. The woman was smiling. Tzuriel, a dentist before all else, knew her teeth were good before she knew the boy was dead.

Duty before pity, her teachers once said.

She screamed something, nearly choked on it: a curse all knotted up in disbelief. Heads turned–sharp, insectile jerks from her fellows, and slow, dazed glances from the nearest humans. Then she was moving, pushing through the crowds, shoving them aside. The woman drew near, Tzurel lashed out. Eyes glinted in deep, slit-socketed masks as she took her by the hair and cast her down. Duty before desire; another mantra, centuries old. Any lesser nymph would've broken the woman's neck and faced the bludgeon for their satisfaction. "Let her die," her sister might've said. "My justice over theirs."

Tzurel was not her sister.

The slave foundered in a tide of turquoise, her hands slipping on the wet stones. What little purchase her reflexes found disappeared in an instant, sending her sprawling just shy of her kill. The boy lay prone beside her, his own fall unchecked. She'd killed him dead off his feet, gone before he hit the ground. The fact of it was preserved in a blood-spatter halo; a blue crown for a head that'd struck the stone without care.

His name was K'tor, she remembered. He was twelve and new to the stockades, all limbs and beak and reedy squeaks. Tzurel had taken lunch with him once–makh rashers and juniper wine on the high-wall. He told her so many bad jokes, she'd lost her appetite.

The shiv stood out from the slit of his mask like a grave-post.

"He could've stopped me."The woman stared at her hands, head bowed before the nymph who stood twelve feet tall, whose own hands, each larger than a moon-dial, shook with rage. She bowed her head, but Tzurel knew it was in thought, not obedience–not even in fear. "He could've stopped me," she said again. "He was faster, stronger. You all are."

She raised her eyes. Tzurel knew nothing of human eyes, but these were blue, and cold, and harder than the sapphires in Khal'Ghorr's signet ring. He stamped papers with it, official documents with the Empire's seal. _Dominion_, it read, as well as _everlasting_, _everstrong_, and many other prideful things. Fates were decided with that ring, with these eyes. Tzurel looked on. What she saw was the Protectorate's seal where none existed, and what it spelled was _death_.

"He could've stopped me, but he didn't, because he was surprised. You are all so easily surprised."

When two feet of sharpened rebar entered through the back of her head, Tzurel knew she spoke the truth. Again she cursed the dhulo tithe and, for just an instant, she recalled her sister's grinning face, then the stockade's only overseer was dead.

* * *

They called her human. They called her slave. The butchers, with their flat masks and huge eyes, knew her as makh: meat to be eaten. These were names she came to, names she knelt for, names she heard when there were fingers in her mouth, around her throat, on her hips. When her sister could speak, she called her Dulaan. This was also a name. It was soft, unlike the others, spoken with a little thumb in a little mouth. Human, slave, makh. These were names, but Duulan was her. This was what she called the girl in the bathwater; the one with the thin, blue eyes and titled chin. The one who watched and waited.

Dulaan was the name she gave when, alone in the Nursery's courtyard, she was accosted by blue-satin figures. They fell like snowflakes, over the walls in an instant. She nearly mistook them Ra'zac, but the ease by which they moved came from purpose, not grace. They turned their faces upon her, human eyes in woolen veils, and Duulan stood in awe.

Butcher-born was what she was, destined to die in three weeks' time. When they put the shiv in her hands, it was not a question but an answer. "Gerel has chosen you for proxy," they said. "Be brave, Dulaan."

Be brave.

When she met the others, she was brave. They were like her, bound to die, bound with names. Humans, slaves, makh. She would lead and they would follow.

When the Narcos and their needles came, she was brave. They didn't find the tourniquet, didn't know they were drugging a dead arm and little else. They left in a rush of brocade and beads, each a thousand carvings, a thousand threads. The Narcos were beautiful and terrible, but they made mistakes, and so Dulaan was awake while her neighbors slept or dazed.

Then the boy noticed, and Dulaan was no longer brave, but bold. When he took her arm, she wrenched it from his grasp. When he hissed, she smiled. "We pass the torch to you," the envoys had said. "Send a signal. Make it loud, make it bright, and the rest will follow."

The shiv was barely larger than a stiletto; a small, deadly thing hidden in the sash of her jerkin. Dulaan removed it with a flourish, her world slowing, its axis of reason and order, its z_akhial,_ breaking in two. Before it disappeared into the boy's eye-slot, the left one, matte black, she noticed the markings it bore. Loops and whorls, pits and gashes. In that endless moment between motive and murder, they were clear as crystal. Dulaan remembered the Narcos and their intricate beads, not so old, but neither so different, and then she knew: Gerel had snapped a spire from the Ascension Temple's tower. Each day, she counted twelve on her way to scrub its floors. Today, there would be one less. The shiv bit deep, her fist striking his mask of cold copper. 'One less,' she thought, and for just a moment, she saw the world as Gerel did.

Dulaan had killed and the others were moving.

Even as the Overseer caught her eye, a glittering mosaic of shattered carapace and flaring, black-bone wings, she could see their shapes melting through the crowd. One circled left, behind the nymph who shrieked an alarm and swam against the stockade itself. Her freckles were a breath of umber stars. They looked so much like her sister's, a constellation from the same sky. Dulaan's smile turned wistful. 'Let it be us,' she thought, casting the shiv aside. 'Let it you and I, but never her.' If Gerel's war could be started here, even if the Overseer killed her where she stood, then maybe, just maybe, her sister's fight would be one she could win.

And oh, the nymph's wrath was a fine point, sharper than any shiv. The smell of her, polished jet and incense, broke upon Dulaan like a vengeful wave, but she felt only a hand in her hair and the ground on her hands–the Empire's restraint at its finest. Dulaan had intended to humor the Overseer, so sow seeds and sally her forth. But like so many, the freckled woman struck with a vengeance, and all around her Ra'zac fell, the nymph not least of all.

For the first time in centuries, warning horns bugled from the slaughter house's ramparts. Dulaan felt the sound in her bones and called it validation.

While the remaining Ra'zac menaced her fellows to the druggeds' oblivious witness, she crossed her legs, clasped her hands, and waited. There would be questions to answer–the last of her life. If there was any power in Gerel's vision, the answers she thought of in those spare moments would matter for centuries to come.

The uprising had begun.


End file.
